- Degas and the DanceOur PickBy Susan Goldman Rubin
- Degas (Basic Art)By Bernd Growe
- Degas, Sickert and Toulouse-Lautrec: London and Paris 1870-1910Our PickBy Anna Gruetzner Robins, Richard Thomson
- The Art of Rivalry: Four Friendships, Betrayals, and Breakthroughs in Modern ArtOur PickBy Sebastian Smee
- The Private Collection of Edgar DegasBy Ann Dumas
- Degas: The Man and His Art (Abrams Discoveries)By Henry Loyrette
- Keeping an Eye Open - Degas: And WomenOur PickBy Julian Barnes / One chapter devoted to disagreeing of claims of Degas's misogyny by other art historians.
Important Art by Edgar Degas
The Bellelli Family (1858–67)
This portrait, with its subdued palette and its unconventional grouping of figures, such as the man having his back to the viewer, demonstrates the impact of Realism on the young Degas. He created it over the course of several trips to Italy, spanning 3-4 years. Each family member — his aunt, her husband and his two young cousins Giovanna and Giuliana — was sketched individually, and then organized into a family portrait, becoming more of a study of individual personalities than a study of them as a group.
Degas had the chance to spend much time with his aunt and her family, but it was not an altogether happy family. The aunt was disappointed in her husband, away from home, and mourning her father's passing. So this early, breakthrough work is also a reflection on Degas' (relatively limitted) experience in a family setting. Here, the father is suggested to be emotionally distant from his wife and daughters, while the mother stands dignified and decisive. Giovanna on the left is clearly the mother's favored daughter, while Giuliana, with one leg poised, is positioned just so to suggest a division in her allegiance.
Monsieur and Madame Édouard Manet (1868-69)
This unconventional portrait of Manet and his wife provides a wonderful example of Degas as the “distant spectator,” capturing a moment of solitude that the subjects might prefer go unnoticed. However, a riddle surrounds it. Degas painted it as a tribute to his friends, and it originally showed Mme. Manet playing the piano. However, some time after he had presented the portrait to them, he visited their house only to discover the painting had been mutilated and the right of the picture had been cut away. Degas was furious and removed the picture, though it was never repaired. Some scholars believe it was the depiction of the disharmony in the relationship between the couple that was the reason that Manet slashed the canvas.
Foyer de la Danse (1872)
There is something unique and alluring in all of Degas's studies of ballerinas, of which there are many. In Foyer de la Danse he presents us with one of the unconventional perspectives that are so typical and distinctive in his work. Rather than evoke the light and atmosphere of the scene, as some of his Impressionist peers might have done, Degas has chosen to create a striking arrangement of space, one which echoes the experiences his contemporaries might have had throughout the new modern city. To achieve this, rather than compose the figures in a more orderly and centered fashion, he has dispersed them about the canvas, leaving a chair incongruously placed in the center foreground. Instead of viewing the room as a traditional box-like container for the figures, he paints it at an angle, suggesting multiple vantage points, almost as if this were an early blueprint for Cubism. The approach is characteristic of his modern, realist approach to composition.
The author Sebastian Smee wrote that Degas had the idea "that when people were listening to music, their habitual self-consciousness switched off. Their tendency to present themselves, and to respond defensively to their awareness of being watched, was no longer an impediment to truth-telling. They had lost the power to censor themselves. Something more essential, more truthful would emerge, and play across their faces. Degas wanted to capture that." Indeed, often in his works music is playing, or else, for example, a woman is bathing and similarly dropping her guard.
Influences and Connections

- Édouard Manet
- Henri Fantin-Latour
- Louis Lamothe
- Eugéne Boudin
- Mary Cassatt
- Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec
- Claude Monet
- Pierre-Auguste Renoir
- Walter Sickert